See How Our Garden Grows

I apologize for yet another garden post. Raelee is spending the night at her grandma's house, and Joshua took a trip up to Minnesota, taking Daniel with him. So I'm here all by myself. Well, me and the kitties. Not a whole lot worth taking a picture, other than the garden, I suppose. So it was a garden post, or a kittie post. I thought everyone might enjoy garden pictures better. :)

Our cucumber and squash/zucchini plants are starting to burn off. I pulled up 3 or 4 squash plants a few days ago. They didn't have any veggies, and all the leaves and stems were dying off. So it wasn't worth keeping them any longer. I haven't thrown out the cucumber plants yet. There are a few cukes growing, and I want to give them a chance before completely giving up on the whole thing. We'll see if we get anymore cucumbers.

Our watermelon plant continues to get larger & larger. It's grown into the walkway. I went ahead and cut some of it back. I didn't want it to reach the strawberry plants & take them over! We do have one watermelon that's actually growing in this giant plant. It's doing really well, and I estimate we'll be able to harvest it in a few weeks. I'm a little disappointed that we don't have any more watermelons, especially considering how large the plant is. But one is better than none! And perhaps more will start growing. We'll see.

We lost one of the cantaloupes (left on above picture). At one time, I counted 9 cantaloupes. Most of them didn't make it. They fell off the vine due to their location and just becoming top-heavy. I found our largest cantaloupe had fallen off the vine as well and was very ripe. I picked it up and tossed it into the woods. We still have two baby cantaloupes that are doing really well, and we new baby cantaloupe. So hopefully they will all cotinue to grow until we're able to harvest them.

Garden spiders have popped up throughout the garden. They are the UGLIEST creatures! But they're supposed to be good, eating up any bad bugs, so I tolerate them. I just try to keep my distance.

I had to put two eggplants into the compost tonight. The branhes they were on had snapped. Fortunately, I have a white eggplant still growing strong (not pictured) as well as these two large black beauty eggplants. They are ready to harvest, but I know that I won't be able to eat them anytime soon. I think I'll go ahead and pick the larger of the two and chop it up and freeze it for later use. But I figured I'd let it keep growing a little longer since it's doing so well. I'll check it in a couple of days.

Our green bean plants have stubbornly decided that they like the roof of the house better than the ground. They haven't blossomed yet, so no bean pods. But they look healthy enough. So hopefully there'll be something soon.

Our compost pile keeps getting larger and larger. I toss in vegetable scraps from cooking, and even egg shells, which are compostable. The squash plants I pulled up also got tossed into the compost. I know these things are supposed to be turned over to promote decomposition, but I'm not that motivated a person. I'm satisfied with just putting things in there.

I was really disturbed to find this on one of my bell pepper pants. It is probably the largest caterpillar I have ever seen. I couldn't tell if these white things were eggs or parasites/larvae from another insect. As far as I know, butterflies lay eggs, not caterpillars. So I have no idea exactly what this white stuff is. The caterpillar has been eating this bell pepper's leaves. So I didn't want to take my chances. I squashed the giant caterpillar and its parasitic egg things with the bottom of my shoe. I nearly cried doing it. As a child, I was always fascinated with caterpillars, but I certainly don't need them eating up my garden.

If anything, I can certainly grow mushrooms. These are not the edible kind, mind you. Living right on the edge of the woods, we always seem to have one variety of fungi or another, but I've never seen these particular varieties before. Thanfully, there aren't any in the garden, but they are out & about in the yard.

I did manage to harvest a large handul of raspberries and two summer squash tonight. These raspberries will be really good in my raisin bran in the morning!